We are compelled to bookend the event, to portion months and years up into manageable, quantifiable volumes of matter and memory. If time is the ultimate capitalist commodity, then our quantification of time is its currency, and it is in this way that the annual review-of-the-year rundowns which one can read in any given broadsheet or tabloid, or viewed on December 31st through a gaze of varying levels of ridicule are -to all intents and purposes – its audit. Is it of any value to do this from a philosophical angle? And, indeed, wherein lies the point? Is it in order to file away each successive year into a unitary index for the historian or sociologist to access at their convenience? If so, are we not further commodifying our notions of time? In order to give this interrogation some perspective, perhaps we should benefit from referring to Manuel DeLanda (1952 – )’s excellent introduction to A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History:

“(I)f the different “stages” of human history were indeed brought about by phase transitions, then they are not “stages” at all – that is, progressive developmental steps, each better than the previous one, and indeed leaving the previous one behind. On the contrary, much as water’s solid, liquid, and gas phases may coexist, so each new human phase simply added itself to the other ones, coexisting and interacting with them without leaving them in the past.”[1]

This being considered, is not our Gregorian inclination towards sectioning off units of duration rendered utterly meaningless? Certainly, it may serve to “time-map” individual and collective events, it can also be useful as measurement of progress and decline. It can, however, be of very little use to the contemporary thinker as Élan vital. It is futile to review a year in terms of its singularity. What we think of as “time” is little more than the shifting of energy, the passing of matter from one state to another. There was, and never could be a 2018, as duration, that which we think of as “time” would necessitate each antecedent year forcing themselves as one into that year which is being experienced. This is Bergsonism at its purest (albeit, too, at its most simplified), and if we were to take that model of the present being nothing other than the past happening all at once – insofar as one may interpret such a complex idea out of its parole – then we may find a perfect analogy for our times: the Twenty-First Century can be defined by its concentrated repetition of the past, both culturally and politically, and perhaps provides us with the first significant parallels between Henri Bergson (1859 – 1941) – for decades dismissed as an antiquity of the old guard in philosophy – and Marxist poststructural thinkers such as Jacques Derrida (1930 – 2004) and, more recently, Mark Fisher (1968 – 2017). For, if we were to take the concept of Bergson’s Duration out of the confines of analytic philosophy and place it in the broader spectrum of Critical Theory (and we surely can, as was amply proven by Gilles Deleuze (1925 – 1995)’s re-interpretations of Bergsonism), then what we are presented with is a like-for-like match of what Fisher called The Slow Cancellation of the Future[2], the “temporal malaise” which is so much a hallmark of contemporary culture that one is hard-pressed to discern between that which has been created last week and the artefacts of the 1970s and 1980s.

Contemporary thinking, I would suggest, has all but eradicated the notion of a sole Philosopher King stood atop his plateau (to borrow the Deleuzian analogy). This has been the case for several decades. In his 1957 foreword to the second edition of Critique of Everyday Life, Henri Lefebvre (1901 – 1991) notes

“…professional philosophers generally ignored the book; for – starting with its title – it entailed relinquishing the traditional image of the philosopher as master and ruler of existence, witness and judge of life from the outside, enthroned above the masses, above the moments lost in triviality, ‘distinguished’ by an attitude and a distance.” [3]

Philosophy has, over the years, necessarily been a process of cross-pollination of thought. In Elemental Discourses, John Sallis (1938 – ) writes

“(i)n Derrida’s texts there are many voices. Some occur as citations from Husserl, Heidegger, or other authors. Yet, in the strict sense whatever is set forth in citations is not the voice of another but rather a passage from a written text. Even if what is cited should happen to be words once heard in the voice of another, they will, in being cited, have been transposed into the written text; in this transposition the voice of the other will have been silenced. And yet, we sometimes attest that in reading the words of an author we can hear his voice behind the words, that we can hear it silently resounding.”[4]

Thus we may observe the clinamen of Lucretius evolve throughout the ages and become Deleuze and Guattaris’ desire, accounting for the clinamen’s inclination towards capital. Indeed, the most pertinent and evolutionary use of philosophy is to commandeer from its massive historical inventory of themes and ideas – and, it can be argued, this is how philosophy finds its true meaning (Deleuze and Guattari themselves said “the only question is which other machine the literary machine can be plugged into, must be plugged into in order to work. Kleist and a mad war machine, Kafka and a most extraordinary bureaucratic machine ….”[5]). One need not absorb every text by Foucault, or attend two-hour lectures on Lacan to gain a healthy reserve of critical resources with which to formulate one’s own theories. Plato’s cave and Wittgenstein’s stonemasons serve very well as building blocks for an architecture of language and socialisation, reality and simulacra. These ideas the modern philosopher must osmose and re-interpret, modify and apply pressure to, and for that very reason philosophical models function in much the same way as art: intense critical thought and complex abstractions simplified to the nth degree as signs, giving flesh to otherwise untranslatable concepts: art builds real architecture in Utopia and peoples it accordingly, yet it draws its strength from its ability to topple said architecture and rebuild. Artistic movements provides the zeitgeist for this architecture, and these zeitgeists are the very agents of its destruction and reformation. Much to Plato’s imagined chagrin, art is in many ways inseparable from critical thinking. At any given moment, the human mind is subject to incalculable heterogonous abstractions which superficially bear no relation to one another other than their chronological linearity – or the oft-cited stream of consciousness, that convenient one-size-fits-all coat with which lazy commentators have dressed such diverse literary figures as Beckett, Burroughs, Thompson, Joyce and Proust. Terms such as stream of consciousness exist to categorise that which has no formal category (other than, in this instance, that of literature). But, if we again consult Bergson, thought processes are time in its purest state.

“Let us assume that all the sheep in the flock are identical; they differ at least by the position which they occupy in space, otherwise they would not form a flock. But now let us even set aside the fifty sheep themselves and retain only the idea of them. Either we include them all in the same image, and it follows as a necessary consequence that we place them side by side in an ideal space, or else we repeat fifty times in succession the image of a single one, and in that case it does seem, indeed, that the series lies in duration rather than in space. But we shall soon find out that it cannot be so. For if we picture to ourselves each of the sheep in the flock in succession and separately, we shall never have to do with more than a single sheep. In order that the number should go on increasing in proportion as we advance, we must retain the successive images and set them alongside each of the new units which we picture to ourselves: now, it is in space that such a juxtaposition takes place and not in pure duration.”[6]

The Twenty-First Century has, since 2001, been bereft of landmark political or social moments. The key word here is “landmark,” indicating a fixed point in time after which the ideological apparatus in place before the event can no longer function, such is the impact it has on society, economics and culture. The word “landmark” also implies space, rather than time, yet is no misuse: chronology and geography are intermingled in memory, creating those very ghosts which populate Derrida’s hauntology, and in keeping with the concept of hauntology, the most critical phenomena of the year occurred just as it was ending. Two separate and distinct events, which happened no more than a week from one another at the end of December and superficially bear little-to-no relation, but which in fact have great reciprocal significance. Firstly, Charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror series gave us another instalment in the form of the feature-length Bandersnatch, which was closely followed by the announcement that HMV had gone into second liquidation, His Master’s Voice now nothing but a pitiable whimper in the neoliberal wind. As outmoded a capitalist model as it is out of touch with the times, HMV has, for decades, pre-packaged culture and sold it on as part of some great promise that what that culture represents is the very essence of what one needs to understand our times.

Within the first few minutes of Bandersnatch it becomes apparent that popular culture will never tire of revisiting the 1980s, as though that decade was both the genesis and zenith of our postmodern metanarrative. And yet again, the past is shown to us through countless factual and technical filters – for instance, it is safe to say that nobody ever bought a Tangerine Dream album in WHSmith in the mid-1980s. WHSmith, like HMV represents the Harrods model of “everything under one roof,” which for a store that deals in entertainment and culture, is a laughably hyperbolic claim. Yet our memories of these shops, for those of us who had childhoods in the 1980s, portray them as precisely that, for our own undeveloped awareness of the sheer richness and variety of culture is reflected by HMV’s own limited scope of same. Thus, it adequately met our stunted expectations. As culture and technology evolved at an ever-increasing rate in the latter half of the Twentieth Century, it soon became the case that this capitalist model of the third place serving as cultural nexus could never fulfil our ever-more-sophisticated understandings of culture. This could partially explain our craving for nostalgia, as the artefacts of the 1980s remind us of the last time we were culturally satiated – the economy of craving and fulfilment was in balance (perhaps it is only in childhood that this balance is ever truly equal). “Nostalgia,” though, as Simon Reynolds (1963 – ) points out, is translated etymologically as “homesickness.”[7] Contemporary sociologists favour the notion of a fourth place in order to tackle the workplace/home environment crossover, but it is more accurate to re-identify The Third Place as increasingly virtual. This is hardly surprising, since 9/11 shattered what was quite possibly the West’s final moment when an event was experienced collectively in The Third Place, and was the last “where were you when…?” moment in living memory. As the Twenty-First Century has unfolded, global events have occurred in what feels like a steady trickle, owing not to a lack of event, but in the way in which events are now relayed to us. In the sixteen years since the towers collapsed, the ingestion of current affairs has gradually slipped away from the static television screen and become something experienced singularly (one-on-one) through portable, streamlined devices. Before the internet, the news was fed to us daily at precise quarters of a clock, with the 6 and 9 PM instalments reserved for in-depth investigations into the ramifications of the day’s events. This may well still be the case, but it is now by no means how we initially learn of these events, which are continuously fed to us via the offices of internet newsfeeds which have no beginning or end, and wholesale information dumps such as Twitter. News is no longer dropped on us four times a day around a centralised information hub (i.e. television or radio), but is now with us all day, and can be accessed from any location via mobile phones, tablet and laptops. Wi-Fi has freed us from the necessity of the specific location, and thus the “where were you?” moment can no longer really exist, since such an occasion is marked by more quotidian, tangential social interactions (since social media, we are paradoxically no longer social beings) – history has always been made in conjunction with analogue discourse to provide context and understanding; the pause for reflection has been superseded by the knee-jerk re-tweet. Is it any wonder, then, that cultural eruptions comparable to that of 1976 have been scarce-to-non-existent during the last decade-and-a-half, and that the cultural satellites of the punk movement can now be bought in Primark on t-shirt racks which also contain images of Miles Davis and Marvel superheroes?

In this sense we can quite easily relate the lack of modern social information exchanges and their replacement by personalised feeds of information to a Twenty-First Century flatness, or to put it simply, an age when globally-relevant events are still unfolding on a daily basis but are no longer felt as shockwaves. Without shockwaves there can be no fissures, which is where Twentieth-Century culture once thrived: jazz, pop, punk, Abstract Expressionism, Conceptual Art and the Postmodern break in general all happened as a consequence of events which were felt as they occurred, and carried real consequences, unlike the political pantomimes of today. The ages in which these events happened had their own zeitgeist modelled from the social mood, and are remembered – perhaps rightly or wrongly – for their cultural and social values. In an age which has had no real shockwaves or fissures a void has inevitably been created which has no atmosphere, zeitgeist or – crucially – human analogue. Since domestic concerns are primarily centred around economy, the average Western citizen concerns him or herself with financial survival and the waning scope for prosperity. Let us, for a moment, contemplate upon a strata of people working not for prosperity or an elevated standard of living, but only in order to cling onto the standard of living they already have. The opiate of the masses has been superseded by a cold bucket of water, terror at a knock upon the door. The clinamen of capital (its desire) is absolute subjectification. In 2018, Brexit once more proved itself to be that very subjectification, spreading fear and hatred across the UK and using similar (albeit more sophisticated) tools to divide the country as did Germany in 1939. Brexit is more pernicious than the campaigns of history, however: there is no single identified common enemy, no one sub-section of society singled out for persecution. Rather, it plays to the worst fears of all social stratifications, always with one lingering threat – you will lose what you have. Again, as with the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, one can discern a palpable sense of what Hannah Arendt called “the banality of evil,” a clear attitude of “rather you than me.” Brexit has played into the neoliberal ideology in the only way it could: divide and conquer. But in recent years, it has become the norm for events to resemble past situations. Occupy, it can be argued, was itself a modified sit-in, grafted from the late-1960s onto the present day and given an Economics degree. Where it has prospered – as opposed to the disenfranchised, disconnected youth of fifty years ago – is in its organisation and the clarity of its voice, both of which can be attributed to technological agencies unimaginable in the last century. We have lost our sense of the epoch-making event, the galvanising force to attempt something different: the rule book is no longer torn up, so much as it is re-told through post-millennial perspectives.

October saw the release of Peter Jackson’s They shall Not Grow Old, a technically astonishing colourised documentary to mark the centenary of Armistice Day. Nothing can detract from the visual and journalistic achievement, although one could also read the film via Jean Baudrillard and liken the process to, for instance, the endeavours of Japan’s Ōtsuka Museum of Art, where only precise facsimiles of well-known original works are displayed. The museum is, of course, anything but that: indeed, one might say that it is part-PowerPoint presentation / part-PT Barnum grotesquerie. Or perhaps the film is more akin to the Abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa which was rebuilt by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.in Upper Manhattan using building materials from the original abbey in Southern France from what remained after it was rebuilt in 840. The latter suggestion is given more weight when one considers that much of the original footage found in They Shall Not Grow Old was filmed using arcane hand-crank cameras which struggled to maintain a steady 12 frames-per-second, which is why the original films appear so jerky. This jerkiness has been digitally offset by high-end digital trickery to save the World War One soldiers from an eternity of coming across like “…Charlie Chaplin-type figures.[8]” This obviously means that fifty percent of what one sees in Jackson’s film is not original footage at all, but very sophisticated computer animation.

When Jackson says “I wanted to reach through the fog of time and pull these men into the modern world, so they can regain their humanity once more” he misses the mark somewhat for what has actually happened is that these veterans have indeed been brought out of the past, but only in a digital suspension: half-human, half-computer-generated chimera, they hang on the screen like exhibits from the Ōtsuka Museum. Similarly, much of the audio track to They Shall Not Grow Old is actors’ dialogue, translated via the offices of a deft lip-reader who no doubt spent as many hundreds of hours reviewing the original footage as Jackson’s team did animating it.

Curiously, one can with great ease finish watching They Shall Not Grow Old and immediately begin watching the first episode of Peaky Blinders (set in 1919, one year after armistice) without any disruption in either narrative or visual quality. Peaky Blinders itself, is an example of history’s reworking and re-presentation. Its non-diegetic soundtrack is entirely of the Twenty-First Century, and consists of artists aping the late 1970s and early 1980s.

There can be no table of contents for 2018, nor can it be reviewed month-by-month. The writer cannot simply disclose a year as a series of events which range in importance or ramification. I certainly have not done this (nor would I ever wish to). Charlie Brooker, when not writing episodes of Black Mirror, will scan the year in a linear manner in his New Year’s Eve Wipe, but for serious discourse this can never fully articulate the essence of a twelve-month duration. I will, however, borrow one recurring sound-off from Brooker:

“That was (2018)…now go away.”

[1] DeLanda, M. (1997). A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, pp.15-16.

“I had come to loathe my husband, Mr Harlax. I mean, physically, be revolted by him. I could look at him and think only of the functions.”

Artemis ‘81

Différance is the funeral held for the meta-narrative.

Memorex. Manufacturer of computer peripherals and recordable media. Established in 1961, Memorex were synonymous during the 1980s with home recording.

Kraken. Legendary squid-like sea creature said to wrap its tentacles, once disturbed, around vessels and drag them to the bottom of the ocean.

The time of year I remember most distinctly from my childhood were those strange weeks when the nights drew in. Halloween, Bonfire Night…the cheap masks at the shop at the end of the twitchel (because that’s what they were called in North Nottinghamshire), the divine aroma of potatoes being charred on the backyard fire which, in our age of ultra-safety, would never be bureaucratically tolerated. Those cold, dark evenings carried their own gothic magic as a child. One could quite easily imagine Spring-Heeled Jack bounding from the council estate roofs and the bizarrely-gnarled trees in the woods actually being science fiction organisms. Renowned as one of the most haunted villages in England, the remains of an old Roman garrison sat atop the clay hill which hamletted the village on all sides. There was always a spectral threat on the lips of our parents, and all of this has indelibly left a quasi-Victorian gothic impression on my recollections of the early eighties.

To begin, then, with the problematic word. When we say “haunting,” we are tacitly referring to the ineffable: concepts which, when attempted to give form to or study, vaporise. Something altogether apart from philosophical immanence, this is the run-out groove which carries the fading analogue vibrations of our specific pasts, and if words such as “haunting,” “ghosts,” “spectres,” (ad nauseum) are to characterise memory this is only because these terms serve best to outline a difference which cannot be described in binaries. We may, if we are so inclined, steer off track and cite Bergson at this point though it serves just as well to propose that memories are recalled in units, rather than successive elements of time. Were we to recall perfectly our entire lives in reverse beginning with the absolute present then we would doubtless pick up on subtle ideological or cosmetic shifts in our environs. We would, however in all probability miss the greater shifts and distinctions, but given that this kind of recollection is impossible, we instead focus on the event. These events, as unitary measures, are themselves “haunted,” as it were, by dead elements (be they cars which are no longer on the road, a foodstuff no longer manufactured or a television programme that nobody else remembers being aired). We may then say that we are haunted by the event, or even the unit.

This is hinted at by Derrida, yet made explicit by the 21st Century permutation of Hauntology. Our factually oblique and rose-tinted recollections of the past coupled with the present conundrum of “already been done” has suspended Western culture in a temporal loop. “Two Steps Back,” in fact. The time-locked cultural blockage of an age after Postmodernism has rendered the “new” profoundly spectral: we are watching, listening and responding to ghosts. These ghosts are the spectres of Modernism and pre-Modernism, the last cultural epochs where technological and biological growth were anywhere near in tandem with one another. Indeed, the “new” is necessarily enshrouded with quotation marks – even visually, the word is spectral. Unknown to me in the 1980s, the literal ghosts alluded to in local folklore were in fact the unconscious parental responses to a time which made more harmonious sense, when there were less technological leaps to bemoan.

Différance is the individuation between biological memory, political memory, cultural memory…it is how Proust’s memories distinguish themselves between Dostoyevsky’s, how Beckett’s memories are internalised whereas Joyce’s remain geographical. Escape from Marienbad, indeed. Différance is the temporal linguistic rift rent by dromology. Différance is the colloquial vapour trails left hanging in the air in the wake of cultural imperialism.

Différance is the family unit with lost unity.

Derrida likened the spectre of Marx (that phantasmagorical after-image which has haunted capitalism for over a century) to Hamlet’s father: literally and etymologically the root spectre at the feast. Indeed, that crucial textual link was made early on by highlighting that Hamlet was “the Prince of a rotten state,” allegorically that same rotten state which was to be found in the wake of communism itself, its ectoplasmic remains congealed in the scattered debris of the Berlin Wall. 1980s Britain, or its working class communities, had more than it’s share of this rot: alcoholism, redundancy, solvent abuse, domestic violence, mass unemployability…all of these were to be found, as a child, beneath the superficial halcyon sheen of the nuclear family.

This impression is what always returns when one hears The Fall. The oblique, rumbling production on Dragnet, the keyboard trail on Frightened, the choppy vaudeville of City Hobgoblins. And those words…like tapping into long-forgotten truths which revealed themselves in layers the more one could discern them. Listening to any Fall record was worth a dozen trips to the library and provided a far more comprehensive (albeit labyrinthine) education than one could hope to gain in those Thatcherite penal colonies we were forced to attend during the week: instant psychic Cinerama of a world made up of grotesque (ha!) dog-breeders, phantom stalkers, Disneyland beheadings and strange conjugations of literary figures. Mark E. Smith saw himself as a writer above all else, and it is indeed within those wordscapes that one is ensnared once those primitive, repetitive rhythms and snarling Northern barks have either enchanted or repelled you. One reads The Fall as one reads Deleuze – in layers and multiplicity; the libido in despair, castrated by its own production. Listen to Room to Live, or Tempo House and you have a Deleuzian machine absorbing as it creates. One can almost hear the ideas forming in Smith’s mind just before he contorts them, the rhythm section in endless repetition as time strangles the pleasure principle.

Once one hears The Fall (either as a joyous or attritional experience) one is at once haunted by The Fall: like Marxism, the time between first contact and present time is rotten with phantoms. The “ghosting” effect on an old television broadcast is merely the ghost of multiplicity, information forced down a tube which is continuously caught up with itself in a cathode Möbius. The “captured” cultural elements of the past, ensnared by Smith, become distorted in much the same way as Francis Bacon would pervert his subjects and, like Bacon, Smith froze his subjects at their most primal as though intuition led him to their animal state: Terry Waite, Alan Minter, MR James, Lou Reed and Doug Yule (in an instant fused into the one chimeric state) – all in a state of “…becoming Fall.” The industrial landscapes sonically conjured by a superficially grotesque rumble are another “becoming,” for in that instantly primal cacophony lay not only the bleak Conservative wasteland of late-70s and early 80s, but also admitted to the industry of Blake’s Jerusalem – a bleakness far sootier and rooted in diaspora than anything suggested by Kraftwerk or Joy Division. Here was (and is, captured in essentia) an industry transcending political trend: if Marxism is the spectre haunting Europe (macro), then The Fall conjure the specificity of a Britain enslaved to a Marxist ontology, or rather the phantom of differance which manifested itself in a typically Northern blue-collar attitude which eternally defies translation.

This was the Britain one would experience if one watched Coronation Street on through a lens in any way similar to Smith’s – the Barlows’ crepuscular killing sprees, Kevin Webster copulating with Jack Duckworth’s pigeons in the outhouse to produce a malformed beak/moustache hybrid, all in those lurid cathode reds and blues of early colour television, yet with shadows darker than a Castiglione monoprint. And we respond to those grotesqueries knowing full well that we – the working class with our fathers risking life and limb daily at the colliery – are the grotesque products of a perverted society. Smith took the narrative experimentation of The Velvet Underground and twisted it to his own vision, throwing in all manner of literary, cultural and political allusion along with it – the mystical autodidact Roman Totale XVIII his early prosopopoeial alter-ego emerging from the song lyrics to commandeer the sleeve notes. So within, so without.

Music has been something which comes and goes in my life, with precious few exceptions. When I wanted to put together a band at the age of twelve, I was too young to do so to any extent other than drafting in school friends to help create an undisciplined cacophony in the spare room. It was, for them, something to stave off boredom and nothing more. For me, it quickly became the case that I could entertain myself more effectively by making a cheap guitar and amplifier sound like something other than a cheap guitar and amplifier: hiding the amp under a pillow with the bass turned all the way up sounded like the atonal hum of a building site, whilst striking the strings with metallic objects made for the sounds of cinematic stabbing (reflecting the potentially lethal act of striking electric guitar strings with metallic objects in the first place). I made no further attempt to form a band until in my early twenties, when any chance of finding like-minded individuals had been scuppered by the lumpen musical ideals left in the wake of a withered Brit Pop: young musicians wanted to sound like solo Paul Wellers and already-existing bands stank of being fully endorsed by their parents, who were probably in bands which emulated Paul Weller in 1983. There was nowhere to be found the kind of person who wanted to create the kind of sonic experimentation I needed to make. The Velvet Underground’s currency – which has always been in fluctuation in the eyes of the mainstream – was at an ebb. Such is the way with being out-of-synch with things: always one paradigm shift from having a real chance at something special. In hindsight, of course, I count my blessings for the music business is among the vilest of industries, and I then lacked the sheer bloody-mindedness to persist at all costs like Mark E. Smith always has. More than this, I lacked the discipline to maintain a single sound throughout anything approaching a career, much less stick to so singular a discipline as music. This is why the likes of Smith, Billy Childish and other counter-culture luminaries who doggedly refuse to attenuate themselves to anything as crass as a marketable sound have to formulate their own economies – and not just financial economies.

Shane Meadows’ 1999 drama A Room for Romeo Brass was filmed in the same village alluded to in the first paragraph. Shot nine years after I left the village, there is a marked difference in the landscape of my childhood and that recreated on the screen, a difference which went beyond representation. Seeing the village in Meadows’ film, I felt no nostalgia, no sudden desire to return there. Indeed, aside from the novelty of recognition, there was nothing to link the me in the present to the me who recalled playing in the exact locations now being used as a stage for Paddy Considine. Partially, this can be attributed to simple displacement and the passage of time, but more crucially the topography had altered to such an extent over those nine short years that my very conception of the village had become the recollection of a ghost, or at the very least an erasure. My childhood existed only in my memory, and no amount of old photographs (of which there are very few) could ever amount to anything more than a multiplicity of reflection. Time is no longer a thing which can be measured by temporality alone – of all the images and zeitgeists left to us by the Twentieth Century, a sense of echoing pastiche is likely the dominant sensation which has only increased with massive exponentiality to the present day. Which decade is this year in the 1990s emulating? To what extent do the purveyors of culture in 2012 understand the forms and aesthetics they are aping from 1969?

I have, since an age too far back in my memory to place with any exactitude, been in a state of mourning. This is no silly Freudian claim of being desirous of a return to the womb: personally, I frequently refer to that oft-repeated Smiths lyric whenever I encounter Freud – “it says nothing to me about my life.” The mourning I claim is the mourning for a childhood half received, or indeed a deferral of childhood which was felt just as (if not more than) keenly during my infancy. Betraying the above claim, I must nonetheless turn to Freud for his unheimlich to describe that jarring notion as a child that there was always something wrong, something awry or missing. Unheimlich is perversely the most fitting term for my domestic childhood situation, for the home was sporadically and decidedly unhomely. Growing up with alcoholism from an extremely early age means that there has been no chance for the child to know anything other than a home run through with alcoholism, and that home being in a relatively (by today’s standards) tight-knit community means that any social comparisons must be drawn from other homes which are in some way complicit with alcoholism (few could have not known that our house was the one with the parent who lapsed wildly into stupors lasting days and, sometimes, weeks. Yet very little was ever done to circumvent the vicious circle of dependency: in fact, the reverse was so often the case). In such circumstances, one lives in a microcosm of Other: there is nothing wrong with this picture…and everyone who knows precisely what is not wrong with the picture knows how to mind their own business about what is not wrong – at least until their front door is closed.

When an infant encounters an adult who is drunk, the first instinct is to think of the adult as “unwell,” which is conveniently confirmed by other adults and becomes the official euphemism. “Unwell” also means “absent” in such cases, even if the unwell person is in the same room, because the sober parent has been purged of all parental virtues, such as responsibility, kindness, indulgence or accommodation. The entire architecture of home life is dismantled to such an extent that the very state of childhood is placed in suspension. If a parent is too drunk to collect their child from nursery, then that child ceases being a child in the eyes of nursery staff and becomes a problem. If a child is not in school because of parental alcoholism, then that child is now a “case.”

But what is perhaps the most destructive of all are those periods when the parent is sober: life is less complicated, certainly, and the parent/child bond is soldered together once more, but there is always the dread – which can occur at any time, with or without warning or cause – that the unwell will return, rendering the moments of sobriety something to fear just as much as the periods of chaos. This, then, is the mourning I have felt since infancy. Petite morts in the most literal sense: mourning the death of the home, the death of a childhood being allowed to live itself out, the small, staggered death of a parent.

I was six years old in 1984, the year forever burned into scholarly discourse as the official death of the blue-collar worker in Great Britain. My father worked in the mines, though ours was a colliery who outlasted many others in Nottinghamshire. Although Calverton Colliery almost survived the century due to private finance (the office block was the last structure to be demolished in March, 2000), redundancy hit our household in 1987-1988. The Calverton in A Room for Romeo Brass is the neoliberal perversion of industry: Vicky McClure’s character works in a fashion outlet in St. Wilfred’s Square, which was formerly a chemist; Considine’s Morrell is unemployed, friendless and entirely disconnected from both morality and self, a parody of identity tripping over itself to fill in the cracks left over from a patchy education and a (tacitly) fractured home life. This is a society very much in the process of restructuring itself, redefining its identity by drawing from its immediate past, its discordant present and its bleak future. Almost twenty years on and that future is not so much bleak as eerie: children no longer play in the streets (an ostensibly glib statement at first glance, but no less true for it). For children in 2018, socialising has become compartmentalised into school, after-school clubs and birthday parties. The common ground of having parents who worked within a location-specific industry is gone, and in its place are streets full of adults who are too busy keeping their heads above water with insufficient McWages to integrate with others on the street – often because those others command higher wages for less effort, but perhaps more often because there is little understanding of what the other’s job actually entails. What once unified communities has alienated it. Mark Fisher adroitly pointed to this diasporic labour culture as both cause and symptom of depression in his excellent essay Good for Nothing. The working-class curse of being made to feel inadequate for professional jobs, whilst feeling inferior (or at the very least, fraudulent) in office or factory work:

“…because I was overeducated and useless, taking the job of someone who needed and deserved it more than I did. Even when I was on a psychiatric ward, I felt I was not really depressed—I was only simulating the condition in order to avoid work, or in the infernally paradoxical logic of depression, I was simulating it in order to conceal the fact that I was not capable of working, and that there was no place at all for me in society.”

It is only natural that this phenomenon trickles down to our children. As displaced as we are in our present economy, this can be nothing compared to a child who feels no tangible connection to a world both virtual and indifferent. We recognise ourselves (or partial vestiges of ourselves) in our immediate culture and react to this accordingly, yet when our immediate culture is purely virtual (such as is the case when a child’s daily routine consists of school-dinner-bathtime-device, as opposed to a routine from the late Twentieth Century which was more akin to school-play-play-dinner-play-bathtime-bed), psychic well-being suffers just as surely as physical well-being suffers from vitamin deficiency. Children identify with – and, terrifyingly, become – nebulous, uncanny forms in video games: forms which have nondescript facial characteristics, limited movement and lifespans with no value. They are both Geppetto and Pinocchio with no reference to a higher meaning. Small wonder, then, that they struggle to place any real value to the social realm. The mirror stage ceases to function when the mirror ceases to reflect. We are now (and have been for some time) in an age of mass childhood dysfunction which has increased at such exponential speed that psychologists, behaviourists, therapists (et al) can no longer sufficiently account for it. This is because the accounting must come from fields outside of Freudian specificity: the social sciences (as evidenced by Fisher) are where the answers are to be found, and from a sociological perspective they are to be found relatively easily. We need only refer to Foucault and thereby note the homogenisation of the state apparatus (the school being modelled on the prison, for example) to see the link between this and a gaming platform such as Roblox, which takes this model to the nth degree. Players create and interact in virtual cell-like buildings, which can vary between prisons, schools, houses, pizzerias or indeed any simulacrum of our reality. Very little distinguishes these artifices aside from superficial décor, and the tasks each player performs is largely standardised and based on production / consumption. The neoliberal ideal supplied (as only the neoliberal ideology would be allowed to) as plaything for a standardised socialising. If any suggestion had been made to me (and, I imagine, any other child) in the 1980s that performing perfunctory tasks in order to achieve virtual (i.e. non-existent) rewards could in any way be passed off as entertainment or – even more scandalously – playtime, this would have been dismissed as some species of Stalinism: a tin-pot attempt at coercing child labour masquerading as fun. Platforms such as Roblox offer no conduits for the superego to develop, and creativity is limited to the basic additions the child can make to their domains. This is the very business school one imagines when listening to The Birmingham School of Business School from the 1992 album Code:Selfish:

Weave a web so magnificent

Disguise in the art of conceit

….

Deposits prisoner robotics

Home to their wives Stepford

Case-carrying

Business School

At the expense of all else the neoliberal worldview must emulate itself, asserting its financial and political dominance in self-replication, deceit and a means to an end mentality (the end of which must ever be kept out of sight and grasp).

I was twenty-five when my mother died, just one week after her sixtieth birthday. Those small, staggered periods of mourning I had undergone all throughout my life until that point returned, massively intensified and furiously indignant at the torment I had lived through. To have my mother’s death played out in front of me so many countless times, whereby the person who should have been a constant in my life mockingly replaced by something so animalistic finally and so swiftly taken from me at a point in my own life when I should have been adjusting and reacting to the vicissitudes of my own adulthood felt like the most vicious betrayal of all. Depression had been a factor in my life since the age of twelve (if I have to give an age to the time when it was finally recognised that the sense of “wrongness” at home had finally been absorbed by my own psyche to become an unwellness in its own right), and by the time of my mother’s death I had already made no less than six attempts at my own life. Any attempts at academia up to that point were offset or sabotaged by personal feelings of insufficiency and I had tellingly fallen into catering – a vocation frequently associated with verbal abuse and physical suffering. All relationships I had were a priori doomed to failure, though that only served to exacerbate the pain when this inevitably became the case. Again, the protracted mourning period playing itself out.

A Memorex, then, for the Krakens. These memories remain buried, submerged beneath countless quotidian events waiting to be re-activated by sensory stimuli. The stimuli, though, must be of the time of the memory in order to function. The Memorex must be a pure recording.

Ti West’s 2007 film The House of the Devil goes further than pastiche: it wants you to believe that it was made in the early 1980s, down to the camera tints, synth-heavy soundtrack, dialogue and content (devil worshippers here deliberately chosen to harken back to the Satanic Panic in the wake of the Richard Ramirez killings). Most tellingly, however, is the film’s title shot. Filling half the screen in garish yellow, the title reeks of cheap exploitation horror though the inclusion of the film’s date in Roman numerals gives pause: the tradition of placing the film’s title with it’s production date directly underneath with All Rights Reserved is something which died out in the late 1970s, thus creating not only a jarring anachronism but also – perhaps most poignantly – turning the charade in on itself. What we are left with is not a reference to the past, but rather an atemporal, half-remembered throwback which forfeits historical exactitude in favour of nostalgia for a time which never happened as it exists in collective memory. The House of the Devil is by no means alone in this stylised misappropriation: It Follows, Beyond the Black Rainbow, The Neon Demon, Nightcrawler, Under the Skin and Amer are but a small selection from the hundreds of motion pictures made with an eye to providing the viewer with that most ultra-postmodern thrill of experiencing the past as they have always remembered it: not factually, but mnemonically via associations and cultural connection. The danger of this, of course, is in the potential for collective memory to wipe out the historical fact. A Twenty-One-year-old watching these films today has no first-hand experience of 1984, therefore leaving them with nothing to distinguish between the two oppositions. Reason concludes that the result of this phenomena will be an entirely muddled collective memory in 40-50 years whereby the Twentieth Century will eventually be remembered amorphously and atemporally.

Though the above may be a peculiarly altermodernist symptom, its eventual effect is, to all intents and purposes, what one is listening to on And This Day, Hex Enduction Hour’s cataclysmic denouement. Time crashes in on the listener all at once, the preceding fifty-three minutes of the album serving as individual elements while And This Day serves them all up at once.

In 2018, we are still in the process of mourning (a deferred mourning, but a mourning nonetheless). We mourn the failed promises of modernism while we adjust constantly to the increasing pressures of a neoliberal world. For the working classes, we mourn ourselves as we struggle to ward off the demands of abstract capital. Our ongoing mental and psychic collapse is as much the product of Victorian Dad ideology as it is lagging concentration in an age of advanced dromology. “Pull your socks up” is scandalously still being uttered by mental health workers who themselves cannot ever hope to reach the bottom of the piles of cases stacking up every day. Those children lucky enough to be dealt with in timely fashion are furnished with ADHD statements as readily as birth certificates, while other children less fortunate (mine included) wait years to be granted a cursory inspection, before an inevitable non-conclusive conclusion. The fault lies squarely with the parents, so the official party line of responsibilisation goes. Parents, however, are sinking under ever-increasing debt just to stay above water. For the working classes, the very concept of a meritocracy is not as ludicrous as it is offensive. Perhaps this penchant (yearning, even) for the relics of the past – albeit reformatted to fit in with our collective memory – is nothing less than a coping strategy: there was a time when those in need would be accommodated, when the poor were dealt with sympathetically rather than with scorn. And as much as we know this to be far from the truth, it is a falsehood far more comfortable than today’s crushing truths. Mark E. Smith was the ever-present rage against the horrors of neoliberalism: fiercely opposed to the fol-de-rol of social media and distrusting to the end of a system which streamlines cultural endeavour to fit the device, Smith took The Fall and made it rougher as the rest of the world became sleeker. The grotesque salmagundi of sound sculpted in the 1980s, consisting as it did of harsh Germanic repetition, quasi-Jamaican barked ad-libbing, Velvet Underground drone and a brash form of working class country music (country and northern, if you will [and he did]) had, over the last decade, become a feral beast of unrelenting curmudgeonly fury, primed and aimed at any and all facet of a West so utterly surrendered to the growing weight of capital.

As amusing as it may be to recall Smith’s innumerable bon mots, jibes and drunken slurs collected over the decades, it is nonetheless to miss the point – Samuel Beckett was no less the caustic wit when in his frequent cups and Jackson Pollock could just as easily clear a dinner party as Smith could a pub. Yes, I frequently return to YouTube for my regular fix of Smith’s brusque humour in interviews yet, for the proper stuff, I delve feet-first into Grotesque and Hex Enduction Hour. These albums weren’t joking. They meant every rancorous syllable. While Morrissey was regaling us with upturned bicycles and Oscar Wilde throwbacks, Smith gave us the world red in tooth and claw, only redder and toothier. And while the former produced countless soundalikes throughout the eighties, nineties and to this day, nobody has ever managed to sound like The Fall. Quite right, too.

As one narrative moves forward, so another regresses. Two films with ghostly themes are in disjointed conversation with one another, jarring in a way which echoes contemporary culture and feeding back on itself in a perpetual time-locked state.